H.L. Hunt's Mount Vernon

The white colonnaded house on the eastern shore of White Rock Lake is a near replica of George Washington's Mount Vernon, slightly larger than the original, begun in 1928 and finished in 1930 by Thomas Y. Pickett, who built it for himself. H. L. Hunt bought it on 17 November 1937 for sixty nine thousand dollars and moved his family in on New Year's Day. Two peacocks, some chickens, a cow and a calf came with the place; Hunt added pecan trees and six deer. He lived there until he died in 1974. The money came out of East Texas. In 1930 a broke seventy year old wildcatter named Columbus Marion Joiner was drilling eight miles west of Henderson with a flimsy pine derrick and a set of battered second hand tools. His third attempt, the Daisy Bradford No. 3, came in on 3 October and opened the largest oil field then known anywhere in the world. It was so large it wrecked the price of what it produced: crude went from ninety nine cents a barrel to thirteen within the year, and hot oil moved at two or three cents before the governor sent the National Guard in. Joiner had sold more than a hundred per cent of his own well and was buried in lawsuits, and on 26 November 1930 Hunt bought him out after two days in a room at the Baker Hotel, one and a third million dollars, most of it payable out of production. The field made Hunt the richest man in America and made Dallas, a hundred and twenty miles west, where East Texas oil money was banked and spent. He drove himself in, and carried part of his lunch in a paper bag.